Convertibility Indicator for Manual Mixed-model Assembly Lines

Manufacturing different products tailored to the needs of their clients is a real challenge that industries face today. Current consumers are looking for products that carry a part of their own identities and allow them to stand apart from the crowd. To meet the requirements of the current market, industries have to adapt their resources to manage the wide variety that affects their entire production system in terms of processes, products or volumes. In this context, many indicators were proposed to evaluate the responsiveness and the flexibility of a production system such as capacity scalability and convertibility metrics. The aim of this paper is to propose a system convertibility indicator for manual mixed-model assembly lines. Convertibility is one of the flexibility aspects, it expresses the ability of a system to change the functionality or move from one product to another. The contribution of this research is to provide new metrics for quantifying system convertibility by integrating product and process information. Experimental results from the automotive industry are presented.